I have great business partners. When I launched GirlAuthentic in early 2013, one of them said to me, “That’s great. Now when are you going to start walking the talk?”
He was right. He and I had been talking for a couple of years about starting a business together. Now I was talking at GirlAuthentic about the need for women to build significant businesses – but I hadn’t moved beyond talk in my business plans with him.
So 12 months ago, we started putting one foot in front of the other.
I’m happy to say we’ve made good progress, all while we were both working paying the bills with other full-time work. In the last year we’ve incorporated Morf3D. We have a business plan. We have a market approach and strategy. We own our name and all associated URL’s, we have attorney and accounting relationships in place and we have added our Chief Sales & Marketing Officers to our Executive Leadership Team. The Morf3D website just went live, and we will be talking publicly with other companies starting this week.
It’s one thing to talk about building a different kind of business. That conversation is really important – it’s why GirlAuthentic exists. But while we talk, we also have to walk.
There is lots to do! At Morf3D, we still have key positions to fill on our Executive Leadership Team. We have target clients to talk to, more budgeting and planning to do, and more people to hire. We need to keep learning ourselves, and we need to completely extract ourselves from our current lives in order to completely focus on building this new business. We still have lots to figure out.
So why do it? Because we believe in walking the talk. My partners and I are passionate about building a company that reflects all of the ideas we have begun discussing here at GirlAuthentic. Ideas like:
A balance of the masculine and feminine vibrations. At Morf3D, we are PLANNING and TARGETING to hire women in additional key executive and other leadership roles. We are also planning to find great young women to join us – yes, there are lots of young women out there who want a cool place to do engineering, design, operations, and consulting! And any of the great guys who want to come are welcome too.
Different structures. For our consulting delivery teams, “full time” will mean Monday to Thursday at our client and Friday to Sunday at home every week. For operations teams, “full time” will be 3-4 days a week at 36-40 hours. It’s different. And yes, we believe it’s totally doable.
We’ve established Guiding Principles for Morf3D, and we’ve thought about how those principles will translate into day-to-day experience:
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[thcol]Guiding Principle[/thcol]
[thcol]What This Looks Like[/thcol]
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[tcol]“Doing work you want, with people you want, where you want”[/tcol]
[tcol]Having fun and being happy.[/tcol]
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[tcol]“Life comes first”[/tcol]
[tcol]Everyone takes 2-3 months off per year.[/tcol]
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[tcol]“If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t”[/tcol]
[tcol]Anything can be resolved through conversation – if in doubt, communicate.[/tcol]
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[tcol]“No assholes allowed”[/tcol]
[tcol]If we make a mistake and hire an asshole, we fix it and fire them.[/tcol]
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[tcol]“Think big, think globally, think fast”[/tcol]
[tcol]Revenue of $100 million or more in 5 years.[/tcol]
[/trow]
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[tcol]“Creating opportunities for others”[/tcol]
[tcol]Good, long-term jobs providing people a living wage. People want to stay with us.[/tcol]
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[tcol]“Creating wealth and abundance”[/tcol]
[tcol]We have the opportunity to do and build other things we are interested in.[/tcol]
[/trow]
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[tcol]“Leaving a positive legacy”[/tcol]
[tcol]This business is around to pass on to the next generation if we choose to stay in the business.[/tcol]
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[tcol]“Focusing on the greater good”[/tcol]
[tcol]We’ll regularly ask, how are we helping our community? Are we working on creating things that will help people?[/tcol]
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[tcol]“Being kind”[/tcol]
[tcol]Life is hard enough, why would anyone intentionally add to the hardship?[/tcol]
[/trow]
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[tcol]“Important ways of being”[/tcol]
[tcol]Trusting, Honest, Having Integrity, Creative[/tcol]
[/trow]
[/table]
For me, that’s what it’s looked like to walk the talk for the past year. I can’t wait to see these values and ideas continue to become real – because that’s how the world changes. It will happen one new business at a time.
What about you? How are you “walking the talk”?
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